Renegades (13 page)

The words were a prayer, but the wet thuds between each one stripped them of their sanctity.  The
thwop
of flesh on flesh as the zombie pummeled Dorcas took what should have been a call for heavenly help and converted it to shattered weeping.

The thing hit Dorcas on her already-broken arm.

She screamed.

In Ken’s arms, Hope gasped.  She sounded like she was on the verge of ecstasy.

Ken closed his eyes.  His fingers curled around the greasy cable, the metal fibers biting into his palms and drawing stinging tears from his eyes.

“Oh Jesus please Jesus please –“

“
Get offa her
!”

Ken’s eyes jerked open, his chin snapped up.

The thing was still on Dorcas.  One wet hand held to the cable, the other was drawn back, pulled into a tight fist and ready to rain a final blow onto her face.  Dorcas was weeping, crying, praying through lips that were bloody and split.

And Aaron flew out of the darkness like vengeance made flesh.  He was flipped upside down, his legs twined around the cable, holding his .357 Magnum with his left hand.  Smoke poured from the barrel and Ken realized belatedly that that was what must have made the explosions.  Aaron had finally used his last two bullets.  Had blown the heads off the zombies that were crawling on Dorcas.

Ken had to consciously refrain from shuddering.  The cowboy had made the shot in near-perfect darkness, and so far away that Ken couldn’t even see him.  He had done it hanging upside down, and using his left hand.

And the shots had been perfect.  Two head-shots, negating the instant threat, buying Dorcas a few precious seconds.

Ken made a mental note never to get on Aaron’s bad side.

Aaron dropped the last few feet and hit the zombie before it could slam its final punch down on Dorcas.  The cowboy’s gun didn’t have any more bullets, but he used it as a combination battering ram/stake, driving the shining barrel into the crater that had once been the monster’s head.

Aaron’s hand disappeared into the thing’s neck.  The zombie jerked.  Aaron grunted and twisted his arm as it jammed vertically through the zombie’s throat.

The zombie made a strange noise, a kind of hiccupping cough.  Then it shuddered and fell away from Dorcas, peeling off her like a grotesque second skin.

It fell past Ken and Hope.  So close that some of the blood from the thing’s peeled flesh wiped across Ken’s forearm.  It was tacky and surprisingly cool.  A breeze followed the thing, and a moment later he heard a thud, then a scream somewhere below him.

“Maggie?” he shouted.

There was no answer.

Dorcas was crying.  Shaking so hard that Ken could feel the vibrations in the cable.

He looked back up as Aaron grabbed the cable with his blood-drenched hand and flipped himself over in a move that Ken couldn’t even have described, let alone hoped to duplicate.  Then the cowboy’s legs were wrapped around the cable and he was once again right-side-up, his face only inches from Dorcas’.

“It’s okay,” said the stocky older man.

Dorcas’ eyes were closed, her face a mass of blood and bruising.  Aaron used his right sleeve to mop some of the blood from her face.  “It’s okay,” he said again, his voice so low Ken could barely here it.  “I gotcha, girl.”

Dorcas nodded.  She was sobbing.  But the sobs slowed a bit when Aaron put his arm around her.  And slowed still more when he said, “Let’s get outta this damn place.”

It grew brighter as he spoke.  Christopher was coming down.

“Did I miss anything?” he hollered.

Dorcas started laughing.  Still crying, but laughing as well, as though refusing to let distress claim her completely.  Refusing to be cowed.

“Not much,” she managed a second later.  She looked down at Ken.  “Don’t just hang there staring up my petticoats.  Get a move on!”

Ken nodded.  He started down again.

And tried not to think about the zombies he saw a few feet above Christopher, clinging to each other, clinging to the wall. 

Building another bridge.

55

Hope stopped laughing.

“You okay, Hope?” Ken said.  He didn’t stop descending.  Just kept letting the cable slide through his grease- and blood-soaked palm.  Kept letting himself drop foot by aching foot into the black.

Hope didn’t answer.

He spared a glance at her.  She was staring up at nothing.

He didn’t know what to do for her.  She hadn’t been bitten.  She
couldn’t
have been.  If she had been bitten, she would have changed already.  She wouldn’t be Hope, she would be dead and gone, just a corpse that hadn’t been buried.

But
something
was happening to her.

And there’s nothing you can do about it now.  So just move
.

He dropped through infinity.  Wondering if his descent would ever end, or if the change that had come over the earth had also changed the elevator shaft.  What if it went on forever?  What if it just kept going until Ken and the rest of the survivors found themselves in the deepest pits of Hell?

We’re already there
.

And there was truth in that.

Derek was gone, after all.  His son was gone.  His wife was somewhere beyond his reach, his baby girl with her.

And his daughter… what was happening to Hope?

She was cooing again.  And he felt something in the cable.  A shiver.  A tremble.

“Guys.”  Christopher’s voice floated down from above, the tones of a strangely lighthearted oracle.  “We should hurry.”

And the way he said it told Ken why Hope was cooing.  She had sensed it before anyone.

The zombies had bridged to the cable again.  And there was no way to knock more debris down on them.

The vibrations in the cable became more pronounced, and it wasn’t hard for Ken to imagine the hands and feet gripping the metal fibers, slipping down hand over hand.  Skinless fingers feeling their way down in the dark, questing for helpless prey.

“Faster,” someone whispered from above.  Ken couldn’t tell who it was.

He opened his grip on the cable.  Opened it until he was nearly falling.  Preferring to die on impact than be captured by the things above him.

The air whipped past his ears, whistling and whining.

But it couldn’t hide the sound of growls above.

Or the sound of his daughter sighing and giggling in his arms.

“Yes,” she whispered.  “
Yessssss
.”

56

Ken hit something.  His left foot hit first, and a bolt of pain seared through his toes, his ankle, his shin, his thigh bone.  His hip almost buckled under him.

He had fallen too many times today.  He had twisted his back.  He didn’t know what it was, exactly, but there was something going wrong inside him.

He stumbled back, off-balance.

It registered – albeit dimly – that there was something to stumble back
on
.  That he was on some kind of flooring. 
Terra firma
.

Then his heel collided with something hard.  His left heel, of course.  New pain rocketed up to his back.  He screamed.

Hope giggled.

He realized he had let go of the elevator cable.  He probably would have let go of Hope, too, if she hadn’t been more or less attached to him with his belt.

He tripped over whatever it was, falling backward in a series of jumbled half-steps that took him away from the cable, away from the only tether he had had on location or direction.

His right foot went behind him, a reverse lunge step.  Too far for comfort, and the agony in his back increased.

His foot came down on nothing.  Nothing at all.  Just dark, empty air.

Ken had a panicked moment to wonder what was happening.  A terrified instant to realize that he must have reached the bottom of the elevator cable.  To then understand that the logical thing at the bottom of an elevator cable would be the elevator itself.

And that he was about to fall off the side of it.

Hope clapped gleefully in the dark.  Laughing as Ken pitched into nothing.

57

The fall was short.

Less than a few inches.  And it came with a tearing sound.

Someone grunted.

“Help me, you idiot.”

Ken didn’t recognize the voice.  It wasn’t one of the survivors, one of
his
people.

Then he saw the form in the darkness, huge and black.  Fear rippled through him for a moment, joining the pain in his back and leg and creating a strangely discordant harmony of terror and agony.

“Help… me….”

Ken felt himself slipping backward.  Downward.  The dark figure moved toward him.

He finally realized who it was.  It was Buck.  The big man had caught Ken’s shirt sleeve.  The shirt – the ridiculous long-sleeve thing that said “I went to BOISE and all I got was this STUPID SHIRT (and a raging case of
the CLAP
).” that Ken had gotten from a dead man – was not designed to bear a person’s body weight, and it was tearing.  He could hear it ripping at the seams, pulling away from him.

And then what?

Ken grabbed for Buck’s shaded form.  The other man grunted as Ken accidentally flailed and hit him a half-dozen times before finally managing to get a good grip on his arm.  Buck backed up slowly, and Ken felt himself drawn back to the top of the elevator car.

He made it all of two steps before kicking something else and tripping.  At least this time he tripped forward.

“Je
sus
,” snapped Buck.  “Can’t you stand up straight?”

“Sorry,” Ken mumbled.  Then he screamed as pain lanced through his ankle.  Not nerve pain, not whatever was wrong with his back and left leg.  In fact, this wasn’t his left leg at all.

It was his right leg.  His right ankle.

He looked down.

And screamed again.  Not merely in pain, not merely in horror.  This time it was revulsion and a sense that right and wrong had abandoned themselves, that madness reigned supreme.

The zombies that had bridged to the cable had been shattered.  They had been broken.  But they had not been destroyed.  And the proof was all around him.  The proof was at his feet.  The proof held tight
to
his foot.

A hand had somehow grabbed his ankle.  The hand led to a forearm, but the forearm did not in turn lead to anything else.  It simply
ended
.

Ken flashed to watching Thing on reruns of
The Addams Family
.  The disembodied hand skittered around and caused mischief wherever it went.  A ridiculous sight gag made even more ridiculous by what passed for special effects back then.

But what held onto Ken’s leg was no special effect.  It was real.  And holding so tightly he could already feel his foot going numb.  Blood started to seep around the hand as the pressure of the grip started to shear Ken’s skin away from his flesh.

His knees buckled and he almost went down.  Stopped himself.

Next to him was a head.  A still-moving head.  Eyes staring in rage.  Mouth opening and closing.

What if he had fallen on it?

What if it bit him?

He reeled back.  Felt gorge rising in his throat.

Buck grunted.  He shuffled forward and punted the decapitated head like a football, kicking it off the side of the elevator before kneeling next to Ken and ripping the hand away in one brute motion.  Ken yelled as the hand tore more skin from his already-lacerated flesh.

“Come on,” said Buck.

Ken nodded.  Tried not to notice how much of the top of the elevator was moving.

Failed.

58

Ken only took a single step before he asked, “Where’s Maggie?”

“Who’s Maggie?”

A double-thud interrupted them.  Ken saw two bodies, nearly intertwined, land on the elevator.  Dorcas and Aaron.  The cowboy still had his arm around Dorcas, and seemed hesitant to let go of her even when they had both feet on the solid platform of the elevator.

“Move, move, move!”

The light grew brighter around them.  Ken looked up.

Christopher was a few feet above.  Coming down fast.

And behind him, it looked like the darkness itself had come alive.

59

Ken had seen Christopher climb through places he would have thought were inaccessible.  The kid was a born daredevil, a combination of adrenaline junky and natural ability.

But he was losing ground to the teeming mass of things that clambered over each other as they climbed down the cable behind him.

Ken looked at Buck.  Even in the dim light of Christopher’s flashlight, he could see the big man pale visibly.

“Come on,” said Buck.

He yanked Ken – still stumbling – over the uneven mass of machinery and broken cables that comprised the top of the elevator car.  And now that the light had grown a bit brighter, Ken could also see how close he had come to pitching off the side and into nothing.  They were nowhere near the bottom of the shaft.  It had to be at least another five or six floors to the ground, and who knew what that would even look like?

Buck had saved him.

And now the big man was leading him to a dark gap in the top of the elevator.

“Emergency hatch,” said Buck, seeming to key off Ken’s look.

Ken hesitated.  When a horde of monsters was on your trail, going into a windowless box didn’t seem like the wisest course.

“Get in,” said Buck.

“Are you nuts?” said Aaron behind them.

Ken looked over his shoulder.  The cowboy was casting about, looking for alternate escape routes.

“There’s
nowhere else
,” said Buck.  His voice rose to a screech, half pleading, half enraged.  Then he shook his head as though resigned.  “Fine, do what you want.”

He moved to the hatch and squatted beside it.  Then looked at Ken.  “But your wife is in here.”